Page 8 of The Spark

Jamie and I moved in on a Sunday night in early September. Lara wasn’t there yet. His mother dropped us off, her awkwardly parked SUV taking up nearly the entire pavement as we ferried boxes from it to the house.

She’d insisted on taking him out to buy piles of things I was sure we wouldn’t need. John Lewis bed sheets and potted plants, cushions that would have looked more at home in her Regency-style living room in Putney. Cookbooks – Delia and Good Housekeeping, and something from the River Cafe, to which Jamie had been twice. An actual coffee machine, the kind that came with pods. And a whole two buckets’ worth of cleaning stuff.

When I’d said goodbye to my own mother earlier in the day, she’d slipped me twenty quid and a packet of cigarettes.

‘Er, I don’t smoke?’

She patted my arm. ‘They might come in handy. Just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘Everyone else is doing it?’

‘Okay. Thanks. Top-quality parenting there, Mum.’ Was it really too much to ask for a sensible going-away present, like a bottle of wine, or some new pyjamas?

‘Well,’ she said, ‘they do count as currency, you know. You can always swap them for something you really want.’

‘I’m going to uni, not prison,’ I said.

As we were arranging our things, Jamie discovered a picture hook on the wall, opposite our bed. He removed the Nighthawks painting from the towel he’d wrapped it in, and set it in place.

‘It looks beautiful.’ I slipped an arm around his waist as we stood back to admire it, like we were seeing the real thing in a gallery for the first time. My eyes strayed to the bronze alphabet bookends now propping up the tiny library we’d brought with us. An N and a J. He’d given them to me the previous night, encased in primrose-yellow tissue paper.

‘Something to mark our first ever home together,’ he said. ‘So wherever our next bookshelf ends up being, we’ll always remember our first.’

I surveyed the books now. His dog-eared copy of A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams; Analysing Architecture; and Art and Illusion, all arranged together in order of height. My half included an illustrated history of Vogue magazine, a coffee-table book of dream houses that was a little too square for the shape of the shelf, and two Nick Hornby novels that my mother had once brought home from a charity shop, never read and wouldn’t miss.

Jamie’s mum came into the room then, ripping the rubber gloves from her hands. She’d been executing what she called a ‘decontamination’, even though to me, the house already seemed pretty clean.

She stopped when she saw the painting. ‘No, Jamie.’

We both looked at her.

‘You can’t keep that here. It might get stolen.’

‘It’s only a print,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s not valuable.’

‘Value and sentiment are not the same thing, darling. Let me take it home. I’ll keep it in your bedroom for you, until you find somewhere nice to live.’

I knew she hadn’t meant it like that. But the comment still stung. The house was fine. We were in a good area. The street was one of the better ones on the list we’d been given.

‘We’ll take care of it,’ I said to her.

She looked at me then, which was something she rarely did. Whenever the three of us were together, she mostly addressed Jamie, save the occasional glance in my direction.

‘Please do,’ was all she said, her voice cracking slightly. I knew then that she was asking me to take care of Jamie, too.

‘Oh, Debbie, you beauty,’ Lara said, peering into the fridge an hour or so later at the four bottles of champagne resting inside. She looked over at Jamie. ‘Am I right?’

She knew his mum’s name was Debra, that no-one ever dared to call her Debbie.

Jamie nodded. I think he secretly enjoyed Lara’s boldness. ‘Housewarming gift.’

‘Obviously.’ Lara rubbed her hands together. ‘Well, what are you waiting for, posh boy? Crack it open and let’s get this party started.’

We drank champagne in the living room as the light shrank from the sky, playing cards and listening to Muse. Debra had – of course – given Jamie a box of crystal glasses to go with the Moët, but Lara pointed out that drinking champagne from flutes on the first day of uni would be the most tragic thing ever. We agreed, so we poured it into the mugs her mum had given her instead, which bore natty slogans like LIFE BEGINS AFTER COFFEE and CUP OF POSITIVI-TEA.

‘Were these... a joke?’ Jamie said, examining his mug with a kind of appalled fascination.

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